The Other Shoe (17 page)

“What about this case, though?” Lovell's face was, and would always be, a child's face, fleshy, florid, and unlined, and he yearned for the lurid things so that he might solve the problem of evil, at least on the local level. He did not suspect of himself that he was a member of that sullen crowd Meyers had just described to him.

“What about it?”

“Well,” said Lovell, “it just seems like something should be done.”

“Why does everybody always want to
do
something? A real high percentage of the time about all you can really do is bear witness and wonder ‘What the hell?' I tell 'em, I tell 'em all the time, over and over again: There's nothing I or anyone else can do. I tell 'em, ‘I don't know' and ‘I don't know' and ‘I don't know,' till I get pretty damn sick of saying it, but that's all there is left to say. I can only get so creative in the way that I handle these things. Do you see what I'm getting at?”

“No, I still don't.” Lovell stood at his side, mistreated and conscientious, and he faced, as Meyers did, straight into the sun, and he held his shirt away from his chest to get some circulation behind it. Meyers could think of nothing more to say to him and began to wish that he'd leave.

Instead, Lovell asked, “Whatever became of your boy Bob? Jump-shot Bob.

“Robert?” asked Meyers. “Santa Barbara, been down there for years.”

“California? Why's everybody have to go to California all the time? But I bet he makes a killing down there, doesn't he? Probably rich, isn't he?”

“Does pretty good. Throws pots.”

“Throws . . . ? Oh. Why?”

“Likes it.”

“Are they gardening ones, or for cooking, or what are they for?”

“It's art. Does it by hand. They don't do anything but look good, which is more than enough in California. He gets more from one of those pots than I ever got for a cow. Lives in a tent, got himself a sort of a sultan's tent set up down there in the eucalyptus and madrona, and you can see the ocean from where he's at. You can smell it. Oh, he's got women, money, got a bulldog named Buster. No, Robert's the
first Meyers in quite a while that didn't get himself tied to this sorry-ass country. So he did okay.”

“You don't like it here?” Lovell marveled.

“I must, 'cause I never even thought of leaving. But it wasn't for him.”

“You just never know, do you?”

“No,” said Meyers. “You don't.”

When at last the deputy thought himself clean and dry enough to leave, Meyers set about restoring things to their usual places. He cleaned the long industrial belt and determined it was no worse for wear, and he guided it back onto the equipment it had once turned, onto the spools and rollers as if it might once again be called upon to spin the thirty-inch blade into a rusty blur. Meyers returned the singletree and the maul and the shovel to the barn. He parked the tractor and sat slumped in its seat. His exertions sometimes caught him unawares these days; having slept very little these last few nights he was almost dangerously tired, but he hadn't finished picking up after himself.

Once he'd hoped to grow timothy here, or just any richer mix of grass, and to that end Meyers meant to run a spring-tooth harrow over it, but the lower meadow was too rocky even for that rough tool, and so he set out to clear the bigger stones, and Meyers would pick rock over the course of many years only to find each spring that a new crop of it had come out of the dirt for him, and in time he would build a wall with it to transect the whole property, with fancy stiles and a fancy gate. It served its purpose and did no harm.

Meyers parked his truck in the barn.

He cut a square out of an old canvas tarp and walked up to the place in the wall where, in 1978, he and Henry Brusett had commenced its construction. From here the thing had spread in either direction like a vine, and Meyers's dedication to it had been a rare constant, as near to religion as he could come. He was thick through the shoulders and
back for it, his fingers so thick he could barely type with them. Here lay his shame, obscured if not subdued; here lay Mike Callahan, the bottom piece of the whole structure. Though his every instinct balked at removing stone from this wall, Meyers began to lift it away. He worked his way down through the courses, and he had lifted tons of it away and was beginning to entertain the most macabre doubts when at last Callahan's shinbone was revealed. Mike had been wearing jeans. Cotton. Nothing left of them. What had been cotton or flesh was gone, but Meyers collected on the tarpaulin most of the many small bones from Callahan's feet, and, of course the larger bones, his legs and pelvis, and the rotten twist of leather that had been his belt, and a brass buckle, a flaring sun. Meyers took away ribs, and spine, and so many joints of his fingers as hadn't somehow been washed away. These were very like gravel now. Teeth rattled out of Mike Callahan's childish skull as Meyers picked it up. He gathered the rubber parts of Mike's tennis shoes and a Ban-Lon shirt that hadn't faded a shade since the day the boy had died in it.

Altogether, it made a small pile under the folded tarp. Darkness fell while Meyers rebuilt the wall, and then in darkness, with flights of pinwheels skidding across his eyes, he carried Callahan back down to his truck, and he drove down to the valley and into town. He went to the reservoir and stole someone's rowboat to go out with the remains, enshrouded with a hydraulic jack for their aid and comfort in the underworld, and over what Meyers thought to be the deepest deep in the reservoir there was a burial at sea. No invocation, not even a splash.

Alone again, he rowed back to shore.

I
N HIS SECOND
year of law school, while Hoot Meyers was home for the Christmas break, he happened to be watching through the kitchen window when his father's final heart attack draped him over the top rail of the pole corral. Dusty had spent the last moments of a charmed life walking out to moon at his new colt, sugared coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other. As a Lutheran elder said at his funeral, he would now be missed by anyone who'd ever known him. Dusty was beloved because he'd been content. He'd played the same Gibson dreadnought all his life, and, as beer and bait and tackle are easy enough to acquire, he'd never needed to strive very much or contend for much, and he was well known and universally liked. As was often remarked, Hoot Meyers was not in many ways his father's son; it had been lineage and love with them, but they were not alike.

So he sold the colt to help cover the bill from the funeral home, and there was a party he did not attend, a wake without the body but with a free lunch, and then the funeral, and then Hoot Meyers went back to Missoula and a mandatory semester of tax and commercial law, a brutal study that felt to him like expiation for some failing of his own heart. He also pulled the occasional shift tending bar at George's Indonesian Lounge, and two or three mornings every week he'd drive home to observe the ongoing collapse of the Meyers' estates, which had become, he soon discovered, encumbered by tax liens. Dusty had
let it go to weeds, and Dusty, strangely adamant about it, would not lend his consent to any other use of the family's lands while he was alive. “Let it alone,” he'd say, as if there were something pristine and fine about their scattered properties, the many hearty crops of knapweed and milk thistle where even mule deer wouldn't bed. “Just let it alone; your Grandpa Felix had me roped into that deal long enough. You start messin' with it even a little bit, then pretty soon that's all you ever do, and you're not a dollar ahead for it, either. They pay me just so they can let their cows out on those fields. Run somebody else's cows—run 'em in, run 'em out, that's what I like—easiest way I ever heard of to turn a buck.”

The Meyers holdings, during Dusty's reign over them, had been so neglected as to be unfit even for poor pasture, and now the widower's son could not escape a certain joy at the absence of his father's interference. It was not very flattering to find that on becoming an orphan his strongest impulse was to dirty his fingernails in his inheritance. One Sunday just before midterm exams, a day he should have spent in his carrel at the law library, Hoot Meyers found himself instead driving his one-ton truck through early-morning fog on Highway 200. The ground, having thawed, was breathing, and he wanted to be on the mountain at dawn, and he did not wish to suffer anymore the misery of considering capital gains, and like-kind exchange, and third-party complainants, and so he thought to be on Bailey Peak all day, doing something.

A set of headlights appeared and blinked off again, somewhere down the highway. Meyers slowed. Again the headlights appeared and blinked off. They seemed no closer. Finally his own headlights brought up a shape in the eastbound lane which proved to be Mike Callahan's Volkswagen, parked on the shoulder. Callahan, with no jacket and apparently no idea of the cold, sat on a front wheel well with his palms pressed together and his hands and arms forming an arabesque above him. Henry Brusett was in the driver's seat, his leather sombrero pulled
low. Meyers slowed and slowed, wanting to slide by. He stopped at last, and with many reservations he called across the road to them, “What are you guys up to?”

Callahan's hair was cut to cheek length in a Buster Brown that pinched his narrow face and twitched with his every movement so that he seemed possessed of ridiculous, uncontainable energy—this style had never been fashionable. “We almost made it,” he said, in awe of himself.

“Made it where?”

“Back,” said Mike Callahan.

Henry Brusett rolled his window down. “Transmission,” he said.

“You can't get it in any gear?”

“We had it in third,” said Henry, “for about the last thirty miles. Just about burnt 'er up. Then even third went out, and here we sit.”

“Well, I'd give you a ride,” said Meyers, “but I'm going up the hill, up the mountain.”

“Up the mountain?” challenged Callahan. “Sermon on the Mount?”

“Yeah. My place. Thought I'd try and get a little something done today.”

“You got a place?” Callahan mugged incomprehension.

“What's wrong with him, Henry?”

“He called and asked me to come and pick him up. He was stuck in Spokane. So I did. I brought his car over to get him, which was maybe not a good idea.”

Meyers was only a few years older than Callahan and Brusett, but he'd been that many years older during their early boyhood, and so they continued to look upon him as their elder.

“Henry Brusett,” crowed Callahan, “is one of the best people I've ever met. You ask him for a favor, and he doesn't ask you ‘Why?' Or ‘How much?' Or ‘How many?' Or ‘How long?' ‘I'll be right there,'
that's what he tells you. And he is. Right there. A right-there person, that's how I'd describe him.”

Callahan had failed for once to overstate. Henry Brusett was generous to a deep fault. For Henry's sake, Meyers thought, he'd better offer them a way off the road. “Like I say, I'm headed up the mountain, but you're welcome to ride along.”

“Where?” Callahan's head flipped as if to track the flight of a roman candle.

“So here you are,” Meyers assessed, “you're sitting by the side of the road, fucked up as you can possibly be, and I bet you're holding, too, aren't you?”

“Well, Lord High,” said Callahan.

“Acid,” said Henry Brusett.

“On you?”

“On Mike.” Henry's moustache had in those days involved half his face; he was solemn behind it. “Or he did have some of it. They were in his jeans, but he just had 'em loose in his pocket, and every time he went after some change or something, a few fell out. And I didn't—you know I just said, ‘Good riddance.' Don't know if there's any left. It's just little bits of paper. He's been takin' it for days, I think.”

“Mike?” Meyers inquired.

“I'm not deaf. I can hear better than you can. Just call me Angel of the Morning.”

“We're getting you out of here,” said Meyers. “You've got no business being anywhere near the beaten path right now.”

“I am not,” said Callahan, “paying anybody to tow this car. But they could have it. You could have it if you want. No. Henry, you're the one. I now declare: This is your car.”

“Go ahead,” Meyers suggested, “hand him that pink slip and a pen, if he wants to sign it over to you, Henry. Be a blessing to motorists everywhere.”

Mike Callahan's mother, the sainted Naomi, had been the only teacher any of them had known during their first six years of schooling, and as well as her gentle guidance had worked with all her other students, it had been insufficient to the rearing of her son, and the boy had just never mustered the strength of character or imagination to think well of himself. Since high school Mike had tried and quit a community college, go-cart racing, fine wines, archery, six jobs, and one marriage, and though he was fairly new to hallucinogens, he thought that here at last he'd found his abiding passion. “Usually,” he told them, “usually you're just the nucleus, the . . .
pro
ton, and you're just sitting there. Drop acid and you get to be the electron for a while. I mean,
spiihn
.”